# Erez Reuveni **Erez Reuveni** is a former Justice Department lawyer who spent nearly fifteen years defending the government's immigration cases, finishing as acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. In April 2025 he told a federal judge that the deportation of [[Kilmar Abrego Garcia]] to El Salvador had been an error. He was put on leave on April 5 and fired later that month. On June 24, 2025, he filed a protected whistleblower disclosure with the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, the Justice Department's inspector general and the Office of Special Counsel. It described a March 14, 2025 meeting about the [[Alien Enemies Act]] deportation flights at which, he said, [[Emil Bove]], then a senior department official, said "the planes need to take off no matter what" and suggested the department might have to tell the courts "f— you." The disclosure arrived while Bove's nomination to a federal appeals court was before the Senate. Deputy Attorney General [[Todd Blanche]] called the account "utterly false," and Bove told senators he did not recall saying it. His lawyers at the [[Government Accountability Project]] wrote to Congress in March 2026 that the inspector general had pushed his disclosure to the department's internal ethics office rather than investigating it. He won the 2026 Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize. > [!note] Stub > This is a short entry that hasn't been fully written yet. ## See also - [[Federal Whistleblower Roster]] - [[Emil Bove]] · [[Kilmar Abrego Garcia Timeline]] - [[Criminalizing Whistleblowers]]